At the beginning of the final commissioning phase of the new MAD BL9-2, a workshop was held at SSRL in July of 1998 on de-novo structure determination using the program SHARP. A heavily oversubscribed workshop (limited to 25 participants with about 50 applicants) gave researchers the opportunity for an update on the beam line developments at the new station BL9-2 and hands-on training on the implementation and application of SHARP. This new program provides a new approach to statistical heavy atom refinement and phasing in protein crystallography.